O Prazer da Leitura (110)

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought...life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (109)

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (108)

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (107)

Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regards to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (106)

Ainda que eu seja mais uma ninguém a vagar sem rosto pelas rodas de livros, pelas prateleiras, tenho a sensação de ser uma penetra. Tanta coisa escrita, tanta gente escrevendo. Por que eu escrevo? O que eu tenho a dizer que já não tenha sido dito de milhares de maneiras diferentes? A quem interessa o meu corpo de letras?

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (105)

Dá-me a tua mão desconhecida, que a vida está me doendo, e não sei como falar – a realidade é delicada demais, só a realidade é delicada, minha irrealidade e minha imaginação são mais pesadas.

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (104)

But I’m afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I’m afraid to start to “make” a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one? as a child thinks about the nothing. And run the risk of being crushed by chance.

A Paixão segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

O Prazer da Leitura (103)

—————— I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.

 

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector